The Homeless Defend Becoming Hotspots

An experiment with letting homeless people make money by serving as wireless Internet hotspots raised plenty of eyebrows at this year’s South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

Geoffrey A. Fowler

Clarence Jones, who lives in an Austin shelter after losing his home in Hurricane Katrina, views the hotspot program as a success.

After igniting a media storm in its first three days, the organizers contemplated shutting down the program, which equipped about a dozen homeless people with 4G hotspot cards. Homeless participants, who wore t-shirts to identify themselves, were charging passersby to access their Wi-Fi connections at a conference where network access is in high demand.

But the homeless men and women who were part of the experiment decided to see it through the end of the conference, not because they were making much money but because they liked the exposure.

“We feel success,” says participant Clarence Jones, 54, who lives in an Austin shelter after losing his home in Hurricane Katrina. Criticisms of the program may have missed the point, he says. “In today’s world, the Web is where it’s at. Now everyone around the world is hearing about the homeless hotspot.”

The experiment was the idea of ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, which wanted to explore a potential replacement for the newspapers traditionally sold by homeless people to make money. BBH New York executive Saneel Radia approached Austin Resource Center for the Homeless director of communication and development Mitchell Gibbs with the idea for the service, which he dubbed Homelesshotspots.org.

“I will be very frank: My first reaction was, here is another group trying to make a buck off the homeless,” says Gibbs.

But he says as he explored it further, he changed his mind. “Our community really needs some awareness building,” he says.

Homeless participants like Dusty White, 52, say that they first saw it as a job to make money. “We are homeless. It gets some of the people back out in the working environment, and that is what I am looking forward to — getting back working,” he says.

BBH promised participants all a minimum of $20 per day for the work, plus extra based on how much wireless access that they sold. But after rain washed out the first few days of the conference – and need for wireless on the street — the participants began to think of it more as a chance to just share their stories.

“The thing is, it made me feel real positive and energetic, interacting with people from all over the world,” says White. “I am really proud of what took place.”

Adds Jones: “We showed people that the homeless are in their community.”

Gibbs says that while most of the participants didn’t make as much money as they might have wanted, their interactions were generally positive. “People have had a chance to stop and put a face to homelessness and interact with a person,” says Gibbs.

Many of the criticisms that the program was taking advantage of homeless people — or dehumanizing them – came from people who didn’t stop and talk with participants, he adds.

Whether hotspots could actually replace the street newspaper business in a sustainable way is debatable, say participants. “There are still a lot of old-fashioned people like me who like the newspaper,” says White.